If the comments this refers to are off topic, despite the overall message seemingly advocating for two apps which is not the path the iNaturalist directorship is taking. I think you should split the comments and move them to another thread, rather than what I feel like is a signal to people not to comment and engage with what that person wrote, which stiffles conversation and can hurt when people obviously put time and effort into writing something.
This is largely true that much of the reasons a taxon isn’t a mess is because there are users working to manage it. It’s one large reason it’s very important for iNaturalist leadership to try and retain certain users as without them, certain taxa risk falling into disrepair. Currently there are large amounts of taxa that are a mess because no users regularly maintain them. Some select taxa have basically no identifiers.
Really what you describe sounds like a feedback loop. People see messes, say Dark Winged Fungus Gnats. It looks like too much work to deal with, so users knowledgeable about that taxon refrain from joining and helping, the issue doesn’t improve because it requires work, that work doesn’t happen because of a lack of knowledgeable / willing to help users, repeat.
It makes sense to me as some of the taxa that are messes on iNaturalist need multiple 10s of hours to fix and can be exhausting. Honestly the more I think, the more I don’t really think iNaturalist greatly values or respects people’s time.
If a user has uploaded 300 copyrighted images. There is no moderation tool to flag in bulk.
You have to individually flag everything 1 by 1.
If there are 10k misidentifications to fix from a single taxon.
1 by 1 it is.
If you need to mark 1000s of plants as cultivated.
1 by 1 it is.
If you want to add or remove many observations from a traditional Project.
1 by 1 it is.
If you want to mark as good as can be on 1000s of observations.
1 by 1 it is.
If you want to use any of the annotations in large amounts like life stage, sex, etc.
1 by 1 it is.
iNaturalist just lacks options to do many things in bulk that can become very time consuming. When doing repeatitive tasks in high volumes, time can really add up.
Though there is some irony that the place which could probably benefit the most doing things 1 by 1 is going through notifications. Which right now you have to check all at once when using the drop down menu.
Do note there are valid risks to consider when enabling the ability to do bulk changes. It’s not as simple as iNaturalist should enable bulk editing for everything, everyone.
The overall message of this comment. iNaturalist directorship should really look into allowing some form of bulk editing to certain things that do not have any available bulk editing tools. Especially as every year there are more observations, more forms of data avaliable, more users, more things to deal with, etc.